GENIUS! #24: Rog Mogale and Air Motion

Not your average speaker designer: that’s Rog Mogale, founder of Void Acoustics, for whom the pursuit of audio technology seems to have been in his DNA at an early age. While most young kids were getting to grips with wooden blocks, at two years old Mogale was drawing drivers and horns on old shoe boxes and wiring them together with string, in what could well have been the very first disco sound system.

Paradoxically, he was at the time profoundly hard of hearing. “Deafness delayed my speech and it wasn't until I was nine that anyone could really understand what I was saying,” he reflects. “This gave me a totally unique perspective on life, and later, on speaker design.”

Mogale rapidly acquired a wholly different set of skills as his hearing improved, becoming not only a highly proficient multi-instrumentalist, but also developing an innate sense of aesthetics that was later responsible for making the loudspeaker a form of visual inspiration.

Mixing live and producing records for some of the seminal acts of the 80s and 90s, he was simultaneously honing his acoustic design skills; it was with the formation of Void Acoustics in 2002 that Mogale’s dream of creating loudspeakers that reflect and relate to their surroundings became reality with the three-way sculpted Air Motion loudspeaker.

"I couldn’t take going to great looking clubs only to see an ugly black box hidden away in a corner” he explains. “Everything had moved forwards in club land – even the moving lights had style – but where was the aural equivalent of the shift in visual awareness?”

This acute observation led to the creation of the Air Motion (pictured). “First, I threw away the box. No box, no resonance. Then I selected the very best transducers I could find and matched them to horns with minimal colouration. I’m proud that we achieved a product totally without compromise, either sonically or visually,” he explains.

Air Motion and its triangular cousin Tri Motion, with their unique palette of finish and colour options, are now one of the leading choices for EDM events and high impact nightclubs, proving that outstanding audio quality and iconic aural art can grace any interior.

Hail to the boffins! Genius! is all about celebrating those clever people whose inventions have transformed the world of professional audio. Mailed out with the February print edition of PSNEurope, the 36-page supplement is also available to read in handy digital-edition form. Read it online, or download as a PDF, at www.psneurope.com/introducing-genius.